CHANCELLOR Rachel Reeves is right to say that steep increases in our water bills are a “bitter pill to swallow” — especially since her government could stop them if it wanted to.
Maybe its reluctance to take the obvious step — nationalisation — is linked to the lucrative rewards waiting for former ministers who play ball. After all, Water UK, the trade association lobbying for still steeper rises, is headed by former Labour minister Ruth Kelly.
Water UK slams Ofwat’s refusal to endorse its own proposed increases as “the biggest-ever cut in investment.”
But the sorry state of our water infrastructure, with leaking pipes, crumbling monitoring equipment and a shortage of reservoirs, is the fault of water companies that have loaded themselves with more than £60 billion in debt while siphoning off over £80bn in profits and dividends and allowing the network they were entrusted with to go to rack and ruin.
The mess is theirs. Asking them to take the hit from cleaning it up is complicated: more than 70 per cent of the English water sector is owned overseas. Retrieving ill-gotten gains shipped offshore will often be impossible.
But this simply underlines how absurd it is to hand control of a resource essential for life to boardrooms beyond our reach — a unique experiment internationally.
No other country has surrendered its water to private companies in this way and it is unlikely that any will, given that the outcome here has been poisoned waterways, sewage-strewn beaches and soaring bills. Earlier this year, over half the people polled said the sewage scandal would affect their vote. It may well have driven the Tory collapse across swathes of southern and coastal England. An even higher proportion, 69 per cent, want water back in public hands.
Labour says the cost of renationalisation is prohibitive and lands the public with private-sector debt.
But the alternative is to be ripped off forever. Some of Labour’s new regulations — increasing compensation for bill-payers when water proves unsafe, more inspections — are good as far as they go. Others, such as higher fines, echo what the Tories had already decided on. An Ofwat power to veto bonuses will lie with people moving in the same circles as the company bosses, whose baseline salaries are obscene anyway.
“Investors” in our water have one motive: extracting money. Designing elaborate regulations to try to make for-profit companies act like public services has failed. Fragmented ownership also weakens our capacity to plan for a changing climate, with water scarcity in south-east England a menace on the horizon.
For all its fanfare, Labour’s water policy is more of the same. Like our rivers and seas, it stinks.
